Dizzy Gillespie

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

I try to teach by example and not force ideas on a young musician. We’re here to be part of a process of exchange.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

They’re not particular whether you’re playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Play the music not the instrument.

Just ’cause I’ve forgotten more than I can play, doesn’t mean it’s not Improv.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

The fans dictate to you when you’re done!

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

Jazz is America’s classical music.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.